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Proving that it’s only a matter of time until the SSD and HDD markets coalesce, long-time hard drive maker Seagate has announced its entry into the consumer SSD space with two brand new drives: The 600 and 600 Pro.

Both drives will come in a variety of sizes between 100 and 480GB, with pricing that will be “inline” with competing drives (there’s no release date yet). The 600 will have a three-year warranty, while the 600 Pro, with better binned NAND, will have a five-year warranty. Beyond the warranty, the Pro also includes some capacitors on the logic board for power loss protection; in the case of a power cut, the capacitors provide enough power to write any remaining data to the drive, preventing data loss. The only other difference is that some Pro drives (100/200/400GB) come with built-in overprovisioning, which gives the Pro a slight performance edge. The rest of the drives, including the controller, are the same.

Speaking of the controller, it is Seagate’s decision to use the Link A Media (LAMD) LM87800 controller that sets the drive apart from the competition. The circa-2012 LM87800 is a bit dated compared with the feature set provided by newer controllers, but its performance is still in-line with most other SSDs on the market (most SSDs are rocking older controllers at this point). The LM87800’s main differentiator is performance consistency: While it isn’t as fast as Samsung’s 840 Pro in a straight line, it has better low-level IO consistency. Basically, in real-world usage, the Seagate 600 and 600 Pro might feel faster than other drives.

The only problem with the LAMD controller, though, is that it seems to have very high idle power consumption — which is ironic, given how Seagate is pitching the Seagate 600 as “the ultimate laptop upgrade.” For comparison, the Samsung 840 Pro draws 0.3 watts at idle, while the Seagate 600 draws 1.1 watts — more than three times as much. On the desktop this isn’t significant, but in a tablet or laptop it equates to minutes of lost battery life. It’s a pity, as the LM87800’s power consumption under load is up there with the Intel 335, and better than the 840 Pro. Rounding out the other low-level details, the Seagate 600 and 600 Pro use 19nm 2-bit-per-cell MLC NAND from Toshiba.

In other news, Seagate also announced the enterprise-oriented Seagate 1200 SSD, which will be available in sizes up to 800GB, but again we have no idea about pricing or availability. Whereas the 600 and 600 Pro use a third-party controller with some in-house firmware customization, the 1200 apparently features a controller that was designed entirely by Seagate. The 1200 SSD has a 12Gbps SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface, but beyond that we have no actual performance figures to share at this point. If the controller performs well, though, we wouldn’t be surprised if Seagate eschews the third-party controller in its next generation of Seagate consumer SSDs. Whether having its own controller will be enough to compete in a market that will inevitably be controlled by SSD makers who have their own chip fabs (Intel, Micron, Samsung) remains to be seen.